Jean-Paul Sartre -- Search For a Method

Presentation notes on Chapters 1 and 2

1
. Marxism and Existentialism

At first glance it appears that Sartre's early existentialism should be in conflict with Marxism. The deterministic nature of historical materialism apparently contradicts the freedom of the individual (and the inherent ambiguity this confers on the future) at the heart of existentialism. The question is, how to reconcile the two?

Sartre takes contemporary Marxism to task for neglecting the importance of individual praxis, his term for purposeful human activity. He is in agreement with Marx's overall analysis of historical materialism, but is seeking to reconcile the role of individuals within it. He agrees with Engels that history is made by men, but within the context of the determining conditions of economics (p.31).

Existentialism, which concerns itself with the relationship of the individual to the world he/she inhabits, is an "ideology" and not a philosophy. It is "a parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge" (p.8).

The fact that man is alienated from his work through the conflict between productive forces and the relations of production is historical reality, not merely an idea. To overcome this, there must be material work and revolutionary praxis.

Referring to his own experience, Sartre says he was not changed by the idea of Marxism, but by the reality of its being exercised around him (praxis). He and his contemporaries were searching for a totalizing theory but not seeing that it existed in Marxism (p.19).

The application of Marx's ideas produced a schism in its ideological underpinnings. The separation of theory and practice made theory a fixed, pure Knowledge while making the practice into "an empiricism without principles". Economic planning by a bureaucracy that fails to see its own mistakes is "a violence done to reality" (p.22). Men and things had to yield to ideas, and if experience did not verify predictions then the experience could only be wrong.

Key passage on p.28 -- the goal of Marxism "is no longer to increase what it knows but to be itself constituted a priori as an absolute Knowledge… Existentialism has been able to return and to maintain itself because it reaffirmed the reality of men as Kierkegaard asserted his own reality against Hegel… Existentialism and Marxism…aim at the same object; but Marxism has reabsorbed man into the idea, and existentialism seeks him everywhere where he is, at his work, in his home, in the street".

The Marxist definition (via Lukacs) of materialism -- "the primacy of existence over consciousness" -- is the object of existentialism's fundamental affirmation.

Sartre concludes that "a philosophy of freedom" will take Marxism's place once the latter has lived out its span, but that we cannot conceive of such a freedom because we have "no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience" that allows us to do so (p.34). This would appear to contradict his earlier definitions of existentialism, but as Barnes suggests in the introduction, actually being psychologically free is an abstraction as long as man is not materially free.

2. The Problem of Mediations and Auxiliary Disciplines

In order to reconcile Marxist Knowledge with individual praxis, "we must find a method and constitute the science" (p.35).

Marxism allows us to situate speeches, people, events and things in relation to its totalization, but as a method the situationist approach is not good enough because it is still a priori. Marxism as it exists does not derive its concepts from new experiences that it seeks to interpret (p.37).

Sartre explicitly states that what is necessary is "simply to reject a priorism" (p.42). To understand an event such as the French Revolution, one must do more than reduce it to "the age-old conflict of mercantile capitalisms". It must first be made to pass through a process of mediation that can take into account the "concrete men who were involved with it" and "the ideological instruments it employed". Discarding context, historical circumstances and real actors from that event's analysis leaves us only with an idealism called "economism", which is something Marx himself denounced. "If one totalizes too quickly…then the real is lost." (p.45)

Sartre writes that for contemporary Marxists, the dialectical movement does not leave the plane of universality, an abstraction that dissolves particulars into it (p.49). However, this was not Marx's intent. Rather, Marx describes his own method as a pursuit which "rises from the abstract to the concrete", the concrete being "the hierarchical totalization of determinations and of hierarchized realities".

Sartre considers Marxism's relation to psychoanalysis (p.60-62), suggesting that the role of the family must be made part of the totalization. Alienation does not begin in man's own work, but in actuality begins in childhood through one's parents' work. Existentialism can integrate the psychoanalytic method by viewing family as a mediation between the universal class and the individual.

Similarly, American sociology (p.66-70) is a useful mediation that takes into account the human relations that Marxism tends to ignore. Field research in sociology (eg Kardiner in the Marquesas Islands) can help to identify real relations among men.

Sartre offers two criticisms of modern Marxism (p.77): (1) It makes the market "more real" than the people who constitute it as buyers and sellers, thus making the former concrete and the latter mere abstractions (marking a return to Hegelian idealism). Thus totalization never exists as more than "a detotalized totality". (2) "The milieu of life", that is to say the groups we belong to, the institutions and culture that surround us, is not studied by Marxism per se but "must also be made the objects of our study". (Note: Today we might call such a pursuit communications studies or cultural studies.)

Despite the usefulness of the other disciplines, "there is no question of adding a method onto Marxism" (p.82). Dialectical philosophy itself must lead to a horizontal synthesis and totalization in depth. If Marxism refuses to do this (because it is already so wrapped up in its own supposed totality), then "others will attempt the coup in its place".

Sartre's conclusion is that contemporary Marxism leaves too many "concrete determinations" to chance, that it ignores contextual details in its drive for totality. He wants to reduce chance to a minimum, and in doing so make Marxism closer to a science. Dialectical materialism is "reduced to its own skeleton if it does not integrate into itself certain Western disciplines" (p.83) such as psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology.

Today we can and should add communications studies to this list, since the media constitutes so much of the "milieu" of modern life, socially, politically and economically.